Ivy Lee: The Godfather

E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing

Dan Zegart

Amy Westervelt

John Hill was born on a farm in Indiana in 1890. His grandfather had been wealthy, but his father lost all the family’s money in a series of business deals gone wrong, and Hill would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture his family's status, chasing the company and approval of rich men. Like a lot of other PR legends, he started his career as a journalist. But unlike the others, he seems to have been fairly good at it. While most of the rest just spent a year or two struggling to make journalism work, Hill was a financial and business reporter for 17 years before he got into the PR game. He even started a couple of newspapers himself, although struggled to keep them afloat.

His first foray into PR came in 1920, in Ohio, when he took a gig creating a newsletter that Cleveland’s Union Trust Company wanted to send out to local executives. By this time he was the financial editor of a steel industry trade magazine … because Ohio. These jobs put him in regular contact with executives who complained to him constantly that most reporters were inept at numbers. They also introduced him to a lot of influencers and executives in the area, and eventually Hill saw a niche he could fill: helping companies explain themselves to reporters who didn’t “get it” quite as well as he did.

Hill opened up his own firm in 1927 with Union Trust and Otis Steel as his first clients. Because Hill was well-liked by local executives, word spread fast and within a couple months he had built an impressive roster that included United Alloy Steel, Republic Steel and Standard Oil of Ohio.The Standard Oil account was an important win for Hill because he was a huge fan of Ivy Lee, the country's first PR guy. Lee may have tapped Edward Bernays as his successor, but John Hill was 
probably a more natural fit. Hill hated how flashy Bernays and many of the other PR guys of his day were. He preferred Lee’s distinguished southern demeanor and emulated it.  Like Lee, he preferred to stay behind the scenes … although Hill took it to an extreme, almost never appearing in the press. When he did show up anywhere, it was always in a conservative suit, clean shaven, hair slicked back, wire-rimmed glasses.

But just when his business was starting to take off, the financial markets came crashing in on themselves… The PR industry was actually one of the few to benefit from the Depression. In Hill’s case, when his first client, Union Trust, went under, he invited one of its top executives, Don Knowlton, to join him in March 1933, launching the firm Hill & Knowlton. His steel and oil clients had weathered the financial storm fairly well, and Republic Steel had just scored the firm
 a whale: the American Iron and Steel Institute—the trade group for the whole steel industry. They requested that Hill and Knowlton open up a New York branch near their headquarters in the Empire State building. That same month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, and the new firm
 was only too happy to oblige.

That same month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, with promises of a New Deal. Hill 

this idea, and so did most of his clients. Standard Oil had him write up an advertorial assuring people American business would be okay, and his steel clients had the firm cranking out pamphlets emphasizing the great relationship between steel workers and their managers.

“Workers in the steel industry represent a high degree of skill and intelligence,” it reads. “Most of the managers of the industry have worked their way up from the ranks. For a long time the industry has been distinguished by harmonious relationships and collective cooperation between employees and employers.”

The reality, of course, was that steel workers and their bosses had been fighting for a long time. And America’s big steel companies had done everything they could to repress unionization. It 
was a fight that went beyond the industry itself--as the largest industry and the largest employer in the country at the time, the steel industry viewed itself as sort of the last, best defense against 
unionization. A protector of American business, defender of bosses everywhere. They were helped in their efforts by near constant concern about creeping Communism in the U.S., starting with the 1919 Red Scare and continuing for decades.

Anti-union pamphlets Hill and Knowlton made for Republic Steel highlighted how union shops actually 

on workers’ rights. “A closed union shop denies the right of the individual worker to make his own choice as to whether he wishes to belong to a union,” one notes. Another Hill + Knowlton client, the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the earliest industry trade groups went beyond pamphlets to sponsor a weekly, pro-business, anti-New Deal radio drama called the American Family Robinson.

But after more than a decade of suppression, the labor movement was gaining steam again in the 1930s. A few years after opening his firm’s New York office, John Hill faced his first big challenge in P.R. And just like with his hero Ivy Lee, it came in the form of a violent labor strike.

Steel workers were starting to band together by 1936, forming the Steel Workers Organizing Committee within one of the country’s biggest unions (the CIO), officially freaking steel bosses out. The American Iron and Steel Institute put Hill and Knowlton on the case, and they wrote up full page ads with a manifesto for the industry. The ads suggested that outside agitators had coerced employees into joining the union; that the union amounted to forcing a worker to pay for a job; and that the industry, and therefore its employees, would be irreparably harmed by a work stoppage right in the midst of its recovery from the Depression. On the last day of June and the first of July 1936, the trade group sponsored full-page ads in 382 newspapers in thirty-four states.

But the unions persisted … and actually most of the industry was willing to negotiate. In 1937 U.S. Steel agreed to recognize the unions and negotiate a contract, which made it more difficult for other companies to resist. Eventually even the trade group backed down. But there was one holdout: Little Steel, an umbrella group that included smaller independent steel companies, was having none of it. Led by a man named Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel, they refused to have any sort of contract with the union. Then in May 1937, Girdler was elected president of the steel industry trade group. Apparently, he had been stockpiling weapons in the months leading up to his takeover of the industry group, and he fully intended to crush this whole union idea once and for all. A strike began at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago the day before Girdler’s election, and within four days he had turned it into an armed conflict.

The union quickly branded the event as the Memorial Day Massacre, holding a mass funeral in Chicago attended by hundreds of working-class residents. Another riot broke out at the Republic plant in Youngstown, Ohio, that June, ending with two dead and forty-two injured.

The FDR administration was having none of it. In October, the National Labor Relations Board ordered the companies to reinstate more than 7,000 workers with back pay.

Then the Senate launched investigations into the steel boss’s methods. Because of Hill’s involvement in pushing anti-union messages and ads in newspapers, he was caught up in the investigation, too. Senator Bob LaFollete discovered that not only had Hill placed ads, he had successfully bribed a journalist. George Sokolsky,  a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, frequently wrote about free enterprise and anti unionism in magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly. From 1936 to 1938, Sokolsky received $29,000 from Hill and Knowlton to write anti-union articles for the steel industry trade group. It worked: he wrote stories in prestigious newspapers and magazines about how the riots were all the union’s fault … never disclosing his connection to Hill and Knowlton or the steel industry. Sokolsky also regularly ranted on the radio for the National Association of Manufacturers and various other pro-business groups. Here he is ranting about that terrible socialist policy: social security.

World War II had just put an end to years worth of labor strikes in steel mills. John Hill was hired to help the industry through it all, but his work on that front was basically a failure. Not only had his clients lost the war with labor, but their goonish tactics had been outed in the press. They looked just like the evil bosses they were pretending not to be.

Still, a lot of people would have been fired for bungling the labor strikes so thoroughly. Hill had read the room entirely incorrectly. And not only that, he’d gotten busted bribing a journalist. But by this point, the steel and oil barons who made up Hill’s clientele considered him a friend, a trusted confident, more than someone they employed. He was routinely described in the press as a “trusted counselor to industry”. And he spent almost as much time managing how his clients saw him as how the public saw them. It was a big part of the Hill & Knowlton strategy in general. Hill and his execs didn’t just manage accounts, they attended the leadership and board meetings of their big clients and weighed in on corporate policy.

By this point, Hill had also learned a very important lesson: his job wasn’t to sell the public on any particular product, company or industry. It was to sell Americans on the importance of American business in general, and particularly big business. He was pushing ideology, creating social license for American industry.

That meant working in Washington, too, of course. Shortly after the war, Hill and Knowlton became the first PR firm to have staff dedicated to public policy work. The Washington office didn’t have its own accounts; it existed solely to handle government relations for the firm’s New York and Cleveland clients. By this point that meant they had their hands in everything from energy policy to agriculture and all points between, for clients like Texaco, Marathon Oil, Coca Cola, Monsanto, and a big new client: the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), is a really good example of the type of strategy Hill would typically recommend for industries, and a good example of how the fake-expert strategy deployed by Lee and Bernays became science denial. It also illustrates the long-term link between tobacco and oil. Not only did Hill have oil clients early on who informed some of his work on tobacco, and vice versa, but he often brought them together in the same trade groups. RJ Reynolds, for example, a key member of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, also had their research arm join the American Petroleum Institute, also a client of John Hill’s by this point. And then there was the fact that the oil companies helped come up with cigarette 
filters for the tobacco companies...that's why they were co-defendants in the tobacco litigation in the 90s. That and the fact that gas stations were a primary retail outlet for cigarettes, so companies in the two industries would often partner up on advertising campaigns.

While all of this is happening between the oil guys and the tobacco guys in the background, Hill and Knowlton has their staff funding and sourcing research on all the 

things connected to lung cancer. And they’re looking for scientists to sign on to their advisory board, but what they really need is a credible director. This was all Hill’s brainchild. The tobacco companies initially argued with him that they had already done their own research, that they didn’t need a whole new research council. But Hill insisted: they needed third party, independent research that would be perceived as more credible by the media. Eventually they gave in. In December 1953, the CEOs of all the major American tobacco companies met with Hill at the Plaza Hotel to launch the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. They needed a reputable cancer researcher as director, which wasn’t easy to find. So in the first several months of the committee’s existence, its “research” was 
conducted by Hill & Knowlton staffers.

There are all these staff memos from this time where they’re giving updates on clients and the oil-tobacco connection is stark, because you’ve got updates on Texaco followed immediately by updates on the phony research committee, with lots of the same staff on both.

Eventually they hired Dr. Clarence Cook Little. He went by C.C., and Hill and Knowlton proclaimed him a world-renowned cancer researcher. It was a bit of a stretch. True, Cook 

have some impressive credentials. He had been president of the University of Michigan, and had worked for a year as the director of the predecessor to the American Cancer Society today). BUT, he was also a huge fan of... eugenics. So much so that he’d been pushed out at the University of Michigan over his views. And in that same year that he was at the cancer society, he also led the American Eugenics Society. But even more pertinent to his work with the tobacco research committee was the fact that he’d never actually done any cancer research. The cancer “lab” that Cook ran just raised mice for actual researchers to use. In the hands of Hill and Knowlton, though, Cook became a widely respected researcher.

By 1947, John Hill and Don Knowlton had mostly parted ways, although the firm kept the same name. Hill gave Knowlton the Ohio clients and kept the rest for himself. Over the course of his life, he turned Hill and Knowlton into the largest PR firm in the world. Although he retired in 1962, he remained very involved in the firm, going to the office daily right up to a month before he died, at the age of 86, in 1977. Hill had stayed true to his commitment to stay out of the press himself, and none of his industrial machinations were well known at the time of his death.

John Hill Documents

S3, Ep7 | John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle

Mad Men

John Hill: The Right-Hand Man

Edward Bernays: The Freudian Slip

Daniel Edelman learned the tools of his trade during World War II, serving four years in a United States Army psychological warfare unit that combatted Nazi propaganda. Returning home to New York City after the war, he had a decision to make: Return to his pre-war journalism career, or use his psy-ops skills to make his way in America’s booming post-war economy?

After a brief stint with CBS, he chose the latter, taking a job as a publicist for his brother-in-law’s record label. In 1947 he moved to Chicago to become public relations director for Toni, a hair care company with a popular home permanent kit. While at Toni, Edelman began to combine a bit of lobbying into public relations. Salon owners didn’t love the idea of women giving themselves perms at home, and had mobilized to get do-it-yourself kits banned. Edelman succeeded in convincing various state lawmakers that salon owners were going too far, and none of the proposed bans became law.

Edelman founded his public relations firm in 1952, with Toni as his first client. By 1960 the firm had 25 clients that included household names like Sara Lee, and a second office in New York. By the late 1960s, it was opening offices in New York and overseas.

The R.J. Reynolds tobacco company approached Edelman in 1977 for a proposal to help restore its image and business, in the wake of the 1971 ban on cigarette advertising.

There’s a lot of documentation on the scientists who helped tobacco firms manufacture uncertainty about the health harms of their products. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway recount 

, some of these same scientists went on to do similar work for Big Oil, to spin the public on the link between burning fossil fuels and climate 
change. t But not much has been written about the publicists who helped to craft this strategy, among them Daniel Edelman. A key part of his 

to R.J. Reynolds was the idea of creating room for doubt in the cigarettes-and-health debate. “In our judgement, if we can convince the public that there is a real possibility that additional research can produce entirely new insights on health and smoking,” he wrote, “we can improve the industry’s own credibility.”

The proposal was a success—Edelman was still advising R.J. Reynolds in 1985, per documents 
in the Industry Archive at UCSF. In the document highlighted below, for example, an Edelman exec on the account is advising RJR how to handle the hundreds of internal industry documents that had, by that point, become public.

Edelman was also an early proponent and practitioner of “astroturfing”: creating fake grassroots groups, with their funding by industry obscured,, to counter real environmental and public health activism. “Edelman was genius at it,” says Christine Arena, a former Edelman vice president.

Over the past three decades, several such groups have gone on to become major players in confusing the public about climate change.“Fossil fuel industry organizations fund these fake front groups, and they give these fake front groups these perfectly innocuous names, like the ‘California Drivers Alliance’ or the ‘Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy,’” Arena says, which are actually run by the Western States Petroleum Association, which is a top lobbyist for the oil industry.” Another prominent pro-industry group that tries to appear independent, the Western States Petroleum Association, is funded by BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil, and other Big Oil firms, says Arena. “It’s fake activism. It’s corporate money posing as activism. And it’s designed to undo all of the progress that real activism makes.”

Edelman Documents

Daniel Edelman: The Psy-Opps King

[00:00:00] It's simple supply and demand, more abundant energy means more affordable energy, producing more American oil and natural gas will help keep energy bills in check. Who doesn't want that? I'm Rick, and I'm an energy voter.

[00:00:15] If you can afford a Tesla, then this message won't really matter to you.

[00:00:22] Name is Dawn Smith. I've been with Wal-Mart for three years. Twenty eight years. Seventeen half years. Six and a half years. Seventeen years. Eleven years. And this love this love my job.

[00:00:39] If these commercials are to be believed, hundreds of Americans are out there rallying around the causes of protecting energy companies, automakers and big box retailers from regulation. Wow, those plucky little guys protecting those vulnerable behemoths of U.S. industry. Ads like this tend to appear when legislation or unions threaten the profits of big companies, they claim to be messages from grassroots groups like energy citizens or the California Drivers Alliance or from employees that just love Wal-Mart so much they want to sing it from the rooftops, but they're actually paid for by industry trade groups or specific companies.

[00:01:32] They give these fake front groups these names that sound their like perfectly innocuous names like the California Drivers Alliance or the Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy.

[00:01:44] This is Christine Arena. She knows a lot about this tactic because she used to be a VP at a PR firm that's famous for using it.

[00:01:53] There are hundreds of them are usually secretly run by lobbying organizations like the two I just mentioned are actually run by the Western States Petroleum Association, which is a top lobbyist for the oil industry. Western States Betrayal Petroleum Association is in turn funded by members including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental, among others. So it's it's fake activism. It's corporate money posing as activism and and it's designed to undo all of the progress that real activism makes.

[00:02:33] Welcome back to Rigged, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and activism right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt, and today's trick is astroturfing. Ah yes. Astroturfing When grassroots don't exist, a plastic version will do very nicely. One of the PR firms most associated with astroturfing is Arena's former employer, Edelman PR. It was started back in 1952 in Chicago by Daniel Edelman, a former journalist who had spent World War Two working in psychological warfare for the U.S. Army. Here he is much later in life, describing that gig.

[00:03:19] Working in a and doing the psychological warfare thing was fascinating because we were offsetting the claims made by the Germans that it all lies. I mean, we had to disclaim them.

[00:03:33] Yep. And then he came home and put those skills to work on behalf of U.S. industry against the American public. Edelman son Richard took over as CEO in 1996, and one of his first moves was to make a really big show of how the firm was no longer going to work with tobacco companies. A noble move after his dad had spent decades helping the industry pushed the idea that secondhand smoke was no big deal. It must be weird doing in the family business when the family business is propaganda and a strategy he crafted for R.J. Reynolds in 1977. Daniel Edelman, Dad. If you like, recommends a civility campaign for smokers as a way to push the idea that smokers care about nonsmokers, that they're not just trying to be assholes imposing their cigarets on the public, he writes.

[00:04:33] A program directed at our own constituency, the smoker makes the greatest sense to us. Example a code of conduct for smokers publicized and all the traditional ways are Smokers Etiquette Handbook distributed in smoking sections of trains, airplanes, etc. Restaurant Tabletops on Smoking Etiquette Awards to courtesy smokers contest to develop the do's and don'ts of civility and smoking. The possibilities are limitless. We need to develop various ways such a campaign can be pursued intelligently and effectively, but also seems to us that within the framework of a campaign of this sort, we have the best opportunity and the most congenial way of communicating our case that there is no real evidence that inhaling someone else's cigaret smoke causes any health problems.

[00:05:32] In 1998, after Big Tobacco had lost multiple lawsuits and been hauled in front of Congress and investigated by the Department of Justice, Richard Edelman said, No, sir, we will no longer work for these guys. Richard Edelman may have sworn off tobacco, but he made up for it with a voracious appetite for oil, or at least the money of oil companies who were more than eager to pay him for bringing that Edelman family magic to their industry. Christine Arena joined Edelman in 2012, leading the business and social practice. She thought she'd be helping the firm do good work for organizations that were doing genuinely good things for the environment. But she quickly realized that she'd just been hired to do greenwashing. In the summer of 2014, Edelman created an astroturfing master plan designed to sway public opinion on TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline. It did just not in the way they'd hoped. In November that year, the astroturfing plan was leaked to the press. Embarrassing, and Edelman enjoyed another moment in the spotlight. By the end of 2014, Arena knew she had to leave. In 2015, the Guardian caught wind of Arena's departure, along with three other Edelman executives who all left the firm over its work with Big Oil. The Guardian published an article on that, and it got quite a bit of attention. So once again, Edelman took a brave stand, promising to do better in the future. The firm vowed to stop promoting climate denial and to stop working with the coal industry. Period. It also committed to no more greenwashing or astroturfing, which is weird because in 2018, they said. An entry for a PR award for a campaign they created for Shell. That's well, it sure looks a lot like greenwashing. In their award submission, Adelman said There, campaign was meant to quote

[00:07:47] raise awareness of Shell's ambition in the UK to create more and cleaner energy solutions in a way that appeals to millennials. And in doing so, to build Shell's reputation in the UK as an innovative energy company,

[00:08:04] they claimed a 28 percent increase in people's belief that Shell quote works to provide a sustainable energy future as a key result of their campaign. Is that greenwashing, you say, persuading the public that a fossil fuel giant is a plucky investor in renewables? I say potato. So, yeah. One of the precursors to all of that was that ad you heard up top from energy. Citizen's Energy Citizens is a front group created by Edelman for the American Petroleum Institute. Way back in 2009. But creating groups like that is something Edelman has done over and over again for lots of clients in lots of different industries,

[00:08:48] like that creation of fake grassroots support, which came to be known as like astroturfing. And Edelman was genius at doing that. And that's like rallying with the tobacco companies that was like, you know, doctors and academics and climate change scientists to take a contrarian perspective and anybody who would like to hear it, the propaganda they'll use that astroturf plan to then influence media to influence politicians, influence regulatory agencies.

[00:09:20] Edelman created all kinds of astroturfing groups to fight environmental regulations, but they didn't just work against environmental regulations. They worked against all kinds of other regulations, too. We're going to hear more about that after the break. The world of politics can certainly feel overwhelming, like right wing movements are gaining traction, and there's too much to do before the midterm elections next fall. Listening to season two of words to win by hosted by renowned communications researcher and campaign advisor a not Shenkar Rosario, each week was to win by takes listeners on a journey from Switzerland to Arizona to the Dominican Republic to unpack some of the fiercest fights and biggest come from behind victories for progressives. New episodes of words to win by premiere every Tuesday. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts. Examples of Edelman's astroturfing work for oil companies and other big polluters abound, but the most over-the-top example of astroturfing they ever did was for Wal-Mart. When I heard about it, I had to call up Mary Annaise Hagler writer and my frequent partner in crime.

[00:10:49] OK, I'm going to. I'm going to just I'm going to read you a little story and we can pause along the way for for your reactions to the song.

[00:10:58] This is sweet, it's story time!

[00:11:00] It's story time with Mary! Here we go." In April 2006, Jim and I hiked the Grand Canyon price and slot canyons in Escalante. During our trip, we ended up in Page Arizona. At five a.m. We were up and ready to go. Although not much else is in page, except, of course, the Walmart Supercenter, we pulled into the parking lot and made at least a dozen RV is not sure what was up. We asked why, and we learned that Wal-Mart allows RVs to stay in store parking lots overnight for free. As we hiked up Bright Angel Trail from Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon, a new adventure was born. I started thinking about all the other amazing things there are to see in this vast country of ours. And then I started thinking about how Wal-Mart, one in every town, practically lets you park overnight for free. The idea just sort of came together. We would take vacation from our full time jobs and drive across the country in a rented RV from city to city, spending the night in a different Wal-Mart parking lot every night. And of course, I'd write an article about it and maybe and may be able to sell a story to an RV magazine with photos of RV in America and only staying at Wal-Marts. Given the litigious age we live in, we decided to get permission from Wal-Mart to do so. So I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include working families for Wal-Mart. In order to find out if we'd be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots. As a freelance writer, I've learned over the years that it's always better to ask about stuff like that in advance. They didn't just give us permission. They said they would even sponsor the trip. Hmm. A blog seemed like the perfect medium to tell those stories and even more exciting. No editors. What writer could say? No to that? Oh dear. All in all, it was a perfect fit. Working families for Wal-Mart wants to get the word out about all the good things Walmart does for people. I wanted to make this trip and write about it. It just seemed to work.

[00:13:17] Is that the end of that story?

[00:13:21] Have you ever heard about the blog Wal-Mart across America become?

[00:13:29] OK. OK, so this is the final post in that blog. It was a project of Edelman PR company for Wal-Mart, and it was started amidst a push among Walmart employees to unionize. So Edelman helped them create this group called Working Families for Wal-Mart, which is one of the many, many, many examples of of astroturfing that Edelman has done for various companies. And it was kind of presented as like, you know, an employee group of of people who really didn't want to unionize and that they were just good old fashioned working class Americans who just loved Wal-Mart. And this blog came about as this whole, you know, fight about unionizing was happening and they would go to all these Wal-Marts, this woman and her husband and they would talk to employees and the employees would just go on and on about how much they loved working for what I'm

[00:14:37] sure they did. Meanwhile, hair and makeup is like just out of the parking lot, right?

[00:14:50] Yes. Yes. You mean, at the time, at Wal-Mart and across America, they viewed Wal-Mart was paying Edelman some 10 million dollars a year to improve its reputation. That reputation, of course, was that it was cheap with its wages and its benefits. Nothing like paying a PR firm, millions to make you look generous instead of just paying your employees. In the aftermath of the Wal-Mart Across America debacle, Richard Edelman himself went to the press with a statement.

[00:15:24] We regret not being 100 percent transparent about the identity of the blogger. That was entirely our fault, not our clients.

[00:15:33] OK. Sure. But nowhere in there did he say anything about working families for Wal-Mart, which was just as big of a fake. The organization was set up by Wal-Mart, and most of its members were Wal-Mart executives, not the store clerks you might imagine. When you hear working families for Wal-Mart? Well, I mean, technically, those executives do work for Wal-Mart, and I guess those families must really like the sweet paycheck they bring home. Wal-Mart execs can earn a thousand times that of an average employee if I were in that family. I'd be very in favor of Wal-Mart. The sole goal of working families for Wal-Mart seemed to be to stop Wal-Mart workers from unionizing, which tracked with Wal-Mart's history when a handful of Wal-Mart butchers at one store in Texas came together to bargain with the store collectively in 2000. The company shut down not only the meat counter at that store, but all of its stores in Texas and five neighboring states, just in case any of those rogue butchers had it in mind to move to a nearby state, I guess. As a business practice, taking off and nuking the site from orbit is always an option. If you're Wal-Mart, of course, Edelman doesn't have a monopoly on astroturfing. The other absolute legend at it is Dr. Evil Doctor Who Doctor, a.k.a. Dick Evil Richard Berman, King of the Front Group. He's the Atai is a win guy from episode three. You don't need to get people to like you. All you have to do is create enough uncertainty that they won't act against you. Remember, back in episode one, when we heard from the doctor with the Center for Accountability and Science and he was talking about antibiotics in meat,

[00:17:26] choosing a burrito or a footlong sub labeled antibiotic free might make you feel like you're making a healthier choice. But in reality, you're simply paying more for a label. To learn more, visit accountable science dot com.

[00:17:41] That's a Berman group. He also runs the perfectly innocuous sounding Environmental Policy Alliance, which is the official publisher of a site called Big Green Radicals that highlights the bad behavior of environmental groups some real eco extremists like the Sierra Club. The money for that site came from the right wing Bradley Foundation and initially went to another Berman group, the Center for Consumer Freedom. That group must have gotten too much bad press because in recent years, Berman scrapped it and renamed it the Center for Organizational Research and Education. Big Green Radicals was an environment focused spinoff of a previous project that Berman had done for Bradley called Activist Cash Dot Com. And then, of course, Berman also runs the Center for Union Facts. Surprise, surprise in the anti-union site. If you're getting lost in this maze of slightly boring sounding, innocuous names, guess what? That's the point. He's hoping you lose track of all the money he's throwing at these fake pressure groups. One of Berman's many claims to infamy is his work going after those radicals and mothers against drunk driving on behalf of the restaurant and bar industry and those hippies at the Humane Society on behalf of the industrial meat guys. Here's an ad for the website Humane Watch, a watchdog site that Berman runs to highlight the nefarious ways of the Humane Society.

[00:19:28] What do you give money to a charity that was involved in a multimillion dollar racketeering lawsuit? Would you donate to a charity that was being investigated by an attorney general?

[00:19:37] When you write a check to an animal charity that moves $50 million to offshore accounts instead of using it to help animals? Would you support a humane

[00:19:44] society that actually ran zero pet shelters? Would you would you?

[00:19:49] Would you? Would you? But he's got more serious sounding groups to the Employment Policies Institute Foundation, for example. OK. Actually, the use of both institute and foundation there, in an attempt to sound serious and objective is goofy and hilarious. Classic Berman. The Department for Academic Study is it's amazing. He really can't help himself, but that organization looks on the face of it like a pretty standard DC policy think tank. And it is in fact part of a cluster of nonprofits funded by the Bradley Foundation. They're an ultra conservative group that spends more money than the Cokes. A huge funding source for anti environmental campaigns, the Bradley Foundation pushes very specific pro-business policies, and in this case, a group of Berman led efforts the Center for Union Facts and the Center for Consumer Freedom and the Employment Policies Institute Foundation all focused on one thing getting rid of labor unions. Here's Burman defending his right not to disclose who's funding which groups on Rachel Maddow. Back in 2009,

[00:21:01] I started a lot of these myself because I believe in them, and then I go to people and I say, Listen, this is what I'm doing. If you are, if your beliefs are consistent with mine, will you help me get this thing right? So who? Who doesn't? Who does anything to put a website up,

[00:21:13] but who on the acorn? So nobody ever, ever supported that. That was out of the goodness of your heart. Yeah, the problem with that is that I can't prove it one way or another because you don't have to disclose it. And so I have to take your word on that and I will. There's no reason not to. But in general, your strategy is not to say I, Rick Furman, am being paid to tell you that the efforts to stop you from eating fish or stop eating trans fats or or or or stop smoking cigarets, whatever they are, I'm being paid to tell you that these things are a bad idea.

[00:21:45] I don't want things that I don't believe.

[00:21:47] OK, but you are being paid to say them as well by people who have a vested interest, if you admitted that. But of course, nobody would call you Dr. Evil anymore. They just call you a PR guy. No reason that you're on the show is because you don't disclose who's paying you to say the things that you're saying. Well, then you

[00:21:59] can't have anybody on your show from the left or the right who is connected to these nonprofit organizations because they won't tell you who's funding them.

[00:22:08] I think that they're entitled to do this. They're entitled, they're entitled to keep their donors quiet. I think that that's up to them.

[00:22:14] Of course, not all astroturfing attempts are as obvious and goofy as a Wal-Mart thing across America. I mean, come on, guys through at least one employee and who doesn't just love the shit out of their Wal-Mart shop. If you want to sell this thing. But if you know what to look for, even the more subtle efforts are pretty easy to spot. They really play up the we're just normal average citizens thing in their names and in their messaging. They talk about saving you average American money, but their number one goal actually seems to be saving a company or an industry money. They use stock photos of people who are supposed to be members of their group in their ads. Hilariously, these guys are constantly doing this and thinking they're not going to get caught. They always get caught. There's no real way to join the group. You can learn more or sign a petition, sometimes even show up at a rally, but unlike genuine community groups, they're never having meetings unless you're hanging out near the Wal-Mart executive washroom in Arkansas. These types of ads really ramp up around elections, so keep an eye out for them in 2022. That's it for this time, next time on our final episode of this series, we're going to find out why Americans really embraced consumerism after World War Two. Come back for that. Thank you for joining us on this hair raising journey through the murky history of PR. Remember to subscribe or ever you get your podcast to find out once and for all who's really pulling the strings. Rig is an original Critical Frequency production, lots of documents, photos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our web site at Rigged Media. Our producer is Marten's Alz Elswick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Barone. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the 1st Amendment Project. Big thanks to Mary Agnes Hagler, who you'll hear throughout this series. If you want to hear more of me and Mary joking around, check out Hot. Take the show we do about climate change. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress, the PR Museum and Vanderbilt University's TV news archive. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep5 Transcription

Astroturfing—the creation of fake grassroots groups to agitate for pro-business policies—has been a favorite tactic of industries and companies trying to avoid regulation for decades. In this episode we take a look at some of the greatest hits.

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

To understand the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created. 

In response to a protest, the country’s largest oil company sent in private security teams, who wound up killing several protestors, including women and children. The company’s spokesperson claimed the protestors were hired by a labor union trying to stir up trouble.

Sounds like it could have been written about any of a half dozen recent pipeline protests, right? But these are the basic details of a mining strike in 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. The mine was owned by Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller family had only a few years prior been raked over 
the coals by a messy antitrust lawsuit and a series of 

 about their monopoly on the country’s burgeoning oil industry.

They needed help burnishing their image, so they called on another industry that was just emerging at the time: Public relations. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the first modern PR guy, came up with that idea that the protestors were 

 Today we would call them “crisis actors” and it’s an accusation thrown at almost every protest, but few people know the whole thing was created
 by a PR guy working for an oil company back in 1914.

Lee invented all sorts of other tricks of the trade too. 

 for a start. Before Lee, companies had a pretty adversarial relationship with the press and vice versa. Lee thought businesses would do better to tell journalists more of their story themselves. It was so unusual that when he first began sending press releases to The New York Times, the paper printed them verbatim. On behalf of rail, coal, oil and tobacco clients Lee also created seemingly independent information bureaus, like the 

, whose experts were regularly quoted criticizing railroad tax proposals.

Again, this was more than 100 years ago. And Lee was followed by generation after generation of PR experts, each adding another bell or whistle to America’s disinformation machine—some on behalf of oil, others on behalf of the chemical or tobacco industries, often on behalf 
of all three at the same time.

For years, the story about disinformation has been that Big Tobacco created it all and then Big Oil copied them. And there's a thread of truth there. Some of the same phony scientists who sold America on the idea that smoking was safe turned around and told them not to worry about climate change. But it’s not the whole story. To get that, we need to look at the context that enabled climate denial to flourish, an information system polluted by 100 years of propaganda. And we need to look at who was hiring those phony scientists—not companies, but PR firms. When people focus on one particular form of science denial, or on one technique that this or that industry copied from another, this is the big picture they miss: the disinformation machine driving everything from QAnon conspiracies to climate denial, vaccine hesitation to white nationalism. It’s bigger than any one industry, but it was built on behalf of all of them, and if we want to have any hope of addressing the large, intersecting, complex problems facing us today, it must be better understood. And then reconfigured, or dismantled altogether.

Just as Ivy Lee was building the modern PR industry, the U.S. government realized it needed a bit of propaganda to help sell American citizens on World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had made staying out of the war a key part of his campaign, and now he needed to convince Americans that it was a good idea to join in...without looking like a hypocrite. He tapped George Creel, a journalist turned political campaigner who had helped with Wilson's electoral bid, to build out what was eventually called the Committee on Public Information and generally referred to as The Creel Committee or the Creel Commission. Creel tapped some of the nation's greatest journalists (Ida Tarbell, for one!), filmmakers, artists, and publicity men to create a 360-degree assault on the 
American public. They made films, created compelling posters, and even launched the world's first "influencers." In cities and towns across the country, Creel and his team found influential members of society and trained them to give 4-minute pro-war speeches before screenings of 
silent films or big events. They were known as the "4-Minute Men".

Several members of the Creel Committee went on to be major influences on the burgeoning PR industry. One of them was a young publicity agent from the theater, Edward Bernays. Bernays had done some creative promotion of plays with particular social missions and had worked for major ballet companies as well, and his work caught the eye of Creel. It didn't hurt that Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Bernays’ father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. While Ivy Lee was 

 part of the Creel Committee, he handled publicity for the American Red Cross during the war effort, and he and Bernays worked together often through their respective positions. Bernays became a trusted colleague of Lee's during the war, the only other PR guy that Lee thought his equal. It was after WWI that Bernays famously said, “If propaganda could be used so effectively in war, why could we not use it in peace?”

At the time, democracy was still a relatively new idea, and those in power were almost universally terrified of it. Propaganda—which Bernays later 

 because “the Germans had given it a bad name”—was created as a reaction to growing public criticism of the titans of industry who had once been hailed as heroes. But it was also created to provide those in power with the tools to manipulate the masses. Bernays, Lee, and 

—Adolf Hitler—were all close readers of French philosopher Gustav Le Bon, who posited that the public, or as Le Bon put it 

 could only be both satisfied and safe when it was controlled. Like Le Bon, Bernays had a real disdain for the public, writing in his seminal book 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

To be clear, Bernays saw himself as part of that “ruling power,” and he relished the role of manipulator.

Ivy Lee died fairly young, in his 50s, and when he did Edward Bernays inherited many of his clients, including both 

the fossil fuel industry trade group that Lee had helped Standard Oil create as World War I was ending. While Ivy Lee largely focused on shaping and controlling the way the media got information as a way to mold public opinion, Bernays tried to manipulate the masses more directly. His best known trick was obliterating the taboo against women smoking in about six months, a 

They tasked Bernays with increasing sales, and he actually went to a psychoanalyst to talk about what cigarettes signified. You guessed it, phalluses. This got Bernays thinking about the “penis envy” women supposedly feel and an emergent push for women’s rights, and boom he had it: he would make smoking a women’s empowerment issue. He convinced a few young women he knew to stage a smoking “protest” in New York, calling cigarettes “freedom torches,” then alerted the press to the protest. It made headlines across the country and within a few months women all over the country were smoking and American Tobacco’s sales were soaring.

So, to recap, PR emerged as a way for industry to deal with a three-pronged threat: the rise of investigative journalism and activism shining a light on the misdeeds of industry, the emergence of regulation (which previously left industry to its own devices), and the expansion of the vote to members of society that had little in common with captains of industry. It was wildly successful. The first wave of PR effectively put a stop to the muckrakers’ early calls for corporate accountability.

Then the Depression hit and once again America’s bosses were the bad guys. Publicists like John W. Hill helped companies like 

paint labor unions, social security, and the New Deal as socialist. Hill paid commentators like 

 to write op-eds in newspapers and magazines, or join panel discussions 

 ginning up fear about these ideas. (At one point, Hill’s firm Hill & Knowlton was paying Sokolsky $40,000 a year to write pieces criticizing Social Security and the New Deal—that's a high six-figure salary in today's dollars). Hill would go on to mastermind the 

 (TIRC), a hub of science denial around smoking...that sounds an awful lot like the research bureaus Ivy Lee had set up some 40 years before. Not a huge shock given that Hill idolized Lee.

Hill’s client roster also included the 

 during those years, so it's no surprise that you see the same tactics deployed by TIRC then used by oil companies to combat rising concern over "the greenhouse effect" or by agribusiness to combat rising concern over GMOs. In fact Hill would have folks from the tobacco companies and chemical companies join the API, because he spotted ways for all three industries to work together—to lobby together for or against regulation, to trade strategies and ideas, even to create new products together. Without PR firms bringing them together, these industries and companies 
may have tended to stay in their own worlds, but the type of cross-pollination Hill enabled was hugely influential.

In fact it’s how the cigarette filter came about.

Cigarette filters are one of the reasons oil and gas companies were named defendants in the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. “When tobacco companies needed to assess the toxics in their cigarettes and in cigarette smoke, the people they turned to to do it were the oil companies,” says Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Oil companies had been testing exhaust and refinery smoke for years because of the Clean Air Act, so they were the ones that had the sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to test for toxins in cigarette smoke.

“And when the oil companies reported back to the tobacco companies on the toxins they were in fact finding in that smoke, you know, what did they do with the information?" Muffett said. "Did they go public and say there's a massive risk here? No. They entered into joint enterprises, joint ventures with the tobacco companies to produce cigarette filters.”

Since the inception of the PR industry, its most expert practitioners have deployed a handful of techniques on behalf of multiple industries and really in service of all industry: to paint business as a good faith member of the community, to sway public opinion, to avoid what infamous PR guy Rick Berman calls "public judgement," and to create political will in their favor. But they weren't operating in a vacuum. In deploying these techniques on behalf of industry, they fundamentally shifted the information ecosystem in America.

Today, it's not just industries that want to avoid regulation or deal with a crisis who use PR techniques, it's everyone from your local county government to your favorite musician to the most 
earnest nonprofit. It's the filter through which all information flows to the public. Which doesn't 

 to be a bad thing, but it has certainly led to the information pollution we have in the U.S. today, where trust in journalists and experts is at an all-time low, the public is tremendously confused, people can (and do) just consume "news" that tracks with their opinions, and so on. To clean up that pollution, it helps to know how to spot these techniques. Our hope with this investigation and related podcasts and documents is to help people do just that—not to make people even more suspicious of everything they see, or double down on getting their information only from one trusted YouTuber, but to pull the mask off a bit and help people find their way through the filters to the information they need to make important decisions about their lives.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

Ivy Lee Documents

Newsom Documents

Schmertz Documents

Berman Documents

Bernays Documents

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

S3, Bonus: We Interrupt This Podcast for New Research + Emily Atkin and Guardian CEO Anna Bateson on Banning Fossil Fuel Ads

S3, Ep9 | Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation

S3, Ep8 | Meet The Harrisons

S9, Ep1 | The Panic

S3, Ep6 | Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech

S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

S3, Ep4 | Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona

S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

S1, Ep1 | Fake Experts and Real Bacon

S3, Ep3 | Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

S3, Ep2 | The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

S1, Ep3 | A Tie Is a Win

S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

S1, Ep3 | Weaponizing False Equivalence

S9, Ep3 | The Next Citizens United Will Be a Climate Case

Martin Zaltz-Austwick

[00:00:00] Over the course of this series, we've looked at the early days of PR, a new profession created to stem the looming threat of democracy, the expansion of the vote, the emergence of labor unions and regulations. The critical eye of journalists, journalists like Upton Sinclair.

[00:00:20] Henry told me his ideas about the fact that it all problems in America and all over the world depended upon men like Henry Ford. Well, once in a while I got a few sentences and I told him that I thought industry was becoming more and more dominant in the world, and I miss America gradually move into industrial democracy. America would find itself in some horror, like the Russian Revolution, and assume

[00:01:00] that Sinclair late in life talking about a meeting he once had with Henry Ford. We've also looked at how early PR guys like Abby Lee helped American industrialists like the Rockefellers maintain their stranglehold on democracy.

[00:01:17] Mr. Rockefeller listened to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd finished my eloquent presentation of why he should do what we recommended. And then he turned to me and whether bland smiles at Mr Lee. Now tell me all the reasons you can thank God why I should not do what you recommend.

[00:01:37] But the journalists and activists and artists didn't just give up the fight when PR came on the scene. This tug of war between industrialists and the public has continued throughout American history, with wave after wave of battles for the truth. After World War Two, industrialists and their PR teams once again felt their existence was under threat, and they mobilized for another fight to protect American free enterprise or really to make the connection between free enterprise and freedom itself much stronger in the minds of the American public

[00:02:15] and using the magic of research, oil companies compete with each other in taking the petroleum molecule apart and rearranging it into, well, you name it. Fabrics, toothbrushes, tires, insecticides and cosmetics. We gillers our home galaxy of things that make a better life on Earth. And you know, it isn't just oil companies that try to outdo each other competing for the customers dollars. The same story is true of almost every successful business enterprise in America. The result is a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet at last. The secret was mine.

[00:03:07] This is from a filmstrip commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute in the 1950s. It's animated, and it kind of looks like something we'd eventually see in The Jetsons in the 60s and 70s. It's called Destination Earth, and it follows a group of Martians who apparently are communists as they discover the wonders of free market capitalism. This sort of thing was rampant during this period of time. The oil industry was not alone in putting out these kinds of films. It started almost as soon as World War Two ended and rolled right into the Cold War. Although most other campaigns didn't lean so heavily into commie Martians. But wouldn't you know our projects were the standard bearers and flag wavers for this new push to rebrand American industry, too? And that's the story you will be digging into today. Welcome back to record a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and identity right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today's trick educational propaganda. Earlier this year, I found an archive that housed all the old papers and files of a PR guy I'd heard mentioned a lot. Earl Newsome, he was more of a behind the scenes Ivy League or John W Hill type, so there's not a lot out there on him or by him. But I'd seen his name mentioned by other PR people in this kind of awestruck way, like they all looked up to him. So I'd been trying to find out more about him, and I saw that all of his papers had been donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society. So off I went to Madison. Traveling two thousand miles to poke around a PR guy's old dusty archives might not sound like your idea of a birthday trip, but it was for me and I hit the mother lode that day in Madison. When I got home, I had to call up my partner in crime writer Mary A. Hagler to process it all. So, all right, this is the thing that is probably blown my mind the most in the last, like 10 years. Like when I oh wow, 10 years, that's a long time. Yeah, it's really like I was really like, Holy crap. So I went to this archive in Wisconsin. As you know, this was my birthday present.

[00:05:51] without telling me you're a nerd. I know, I know. And because I had, I had seen this one guy's name mentioned by other PR people. But like, you know, they would just be like, Oh, Earl Newsom was a genius. But then I couldn't find that much about him in particular. And so I thought, Oh, this guy must have been really interesting because he's being name checked by all these people. But he, like, kept a low profile. And those are those are the ones that usually like, you know, did the most M.C. Lady

[00:06:22] Kert and certainly exactly is the one who leaves the

[00:06:26] Kert. That's right. That's right. Mm hmm. That's right. Yeah, I found him and I realized that, oh, like, he worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which is now ExxonMobil. He worked for, you know, he did some stuff for a couple of different petroleum trade groups. He worked for Ford GM Campbell's Soup, Eli Lilly like a ton of massive American companies. And in his Don Draper totally Don Draper. Yes. I mean, he worked with Standard Oil from the late 30s to the late 60s. So a really long time there were like, I mean, I don't even know, like maybe a hundred boxes of standard oil things. And in one of them, there was a bunch of folders marked confidential and all these like strategy documents and stuff. And I found this thing where he had pulled together all of his big corporate clients, and he had basically warned them as World War Two was coming to a close. And he was like, You guys, there's a big problem coming down the pipeline for you. And it's not, you know, us losing the war and it's not, you know, all these government contracts going away. It is the fact that the American public has spent the last few years getting very used to the government being extremely competent and actually making their lives run well. And that's not good for you because you don't want the American public turning away from free enterprise. And so like, we need to get ahead of this. We need to remind Americans that free enterprise and competitive capitalism are like what makes America unique and what gives them their freedom? And I mean, he lays out this whole strategy of like, OK, we're going to focus on all of the innovative things our research departments are doing and how we offer higher wages than other places in the world and how we're coming up with all these really cool gadgets that people can buy and how we're taking America into the future and we're going to coordinate. But it's not going to look coordinated. We're not going to use like, you know, the US Chamber of Commerce or anything like that. We're not even going to say the phrase free enterprise in any of these things. We're just going to like make sure that we sort of highlight this throughout. I mean, maybe there were some there was some amount of like, you know, organic reaction to the war or something. But but like it's I don't know. It was surprising to me just how much these companies had sort of strategized and also like how freaked out they were about the American public getting used to the government, like doing stuff for them. Oh my God, this is still so pernicious today, right? Where people are like, it's why so many people hate the Green New Deal, because the government in a position of giving you things and they're like, No, that's the corporations job, but they don't do that. Yeah, they never have. In digging through the URL, Newsom archives some more. I found that one way a standard oil in particular invested in spreading the gospel of free enterprise was via donations to universities. And they weren't alone in that. In the 1950s, various lawsuits in state courts had paved the way for corporations to make tax deductible donations to universities. Newsom's files mention a guy named Frank Abrams. He was a VP on Standard Oil in the 1950s. They found a speech that Abrams gave and that Newsom's team wrote in New York. The title was education and industry and in it. Abrams quotes the chairman of the board of one of Newsom's. Other clients probably also a quote that Newsom wrote, saying if

[00:10:26] corporations do not intervene with generous donations, the federal government will by default be given this responsibility. Government aid will mean increase taxes with the final result that business will in effect, be aiding but without any freedom of choice.

[00:10:43] In other words, if you donate, at least you get some say in how your donation is used at universities. If you just pay taxes well, then the government decides new society as a whole will decide how it wants to be organized. They might make decisions that don't benefit. Your business can't have that. Abrams goes on to emphasize certain indirect benefits of corporations donating to universities education.

[00:11:12] More and better education is needed if we are to maintain that most cherished of man's works a free society.

[00:11:20] Later on, he really hits the free enterprise message

[00:11:24] as an example. There is a tendency on the part of some people to call on the government to take over more and more functions and responsibilities, born previously by citizens acting as individuals or voluntary associations. In each case, the claim is that private or voluntary group initiative has failed, but the public can be better served by a new government bureau. My observation of political history both here and abroad during 40 years was Standard Oil Company provides evidence of how this thinking can develop even in a swill like ours, where the tradition of democracy and free enterprise is well developed. Each time government takes over a new function, a free society shrinks by that much. A step has been taken toward statism, a system holding great dangers for the general well-being of this country and incidentally, for stockholders investment in corporations. This is a problem with great dimension, in my view, but I think finally, we can rely on a prudent and mature people that is an educated people to deal properly with it.

[00:12:41] Again, he's framing a healthy civil society supported by a functional government. That's something that happened during the World War as a dangerous threat to freedom. Newsom had recommended various ad campaigns highlighting the benefits of free enterprise without ever using the words free enterprise, of course.

[00:13:03] Markets are people with incomes and demand. In the past two years alone, our population has increased by five million. Kind of personal freedom, which creates the greatest incentive for individual achievement incentives that inspire free to action that fire the spirit of great accomplishments that enable all of us to put our whole hearts into hard work because of the personal satisfactions and benefits that we know will be our reward. In America, our free, privately owned competitive enterprise system never stops with rewards, but just a few people. The freedom, the opportunities, the rewards for achievement have directly enabled all of us to live on a scale and dreamed of in any other country of the world.

[00:13:43] Socialism has spread the shadow of human regimentation over most of the nations of the Earth, and the shadow is encroaching upon our own liberty. Now, let's be practical for a moment, is the American way of life worth bothering about. That is where the viewpoint of self-interest. Well, let's see. Our freedom stems from the fact that America is a republic founded on a constitution and dedicated to the principle of democracy and the worth of the individual.

[00:14:17] Our old friend Eddie Bernays, was big on corporate America, protecting free enterprise too. Around the same time that Newsom was cautioning his clients about the threat of statism, Bernays was giving speeches to industrialists about that very same threat and advising them on how they should handle the postwar era to ensure that free enterprise survived between the two of them. Bernays and NewsOne would have been bending the ear of almost every top CEO in the country on this subject. But something even more terrifying than a functional government was looming on the horizon could throw a spanner in the works of the finely tuned PR machine the 1960s. More on that after this break. We heard in the first half how PR spent the 1940s and 1950s selling the American public on the restorative and invigorating qualities of free enterprise. But even the fear and paranoia of the Cold War couldn't keep the 1960s from rushing on in. Suddenly, it looked like the early 20th century again, you had social movements everywhere, arguing for civil rights, gender equity, LGBTQ rights and then the antiwar movement responding to Vietnam. Here's Reverend Lennox Yearwood, founder of the Hip Hop Caucus. Talking about those days

[00:15:45] was also important is that the people were in the streets, so you had the black people with the Black Power movement was in the streets

[00:15:52] and that was the most famous actors.

[00:15:55] You had the women's movement that was emerging, the gay rights movement that was that was powerful and in New York City and throughout the world was just moving forth. You had all of the even had the the anti-Vietnam movements, even young white kids who were putting out street heat.

[00:16:12] Then at the same time, you also had the emergence of the environmental and consumer protection movements with Rachel Carson.

[00:16:20] We have to remember the children born today are exposed to these chemicals from birth, perhaps even before birth. Now what is going to happen to them in adult life as a result of that exposure?

[00:16:36] the business is not so much opposed to Marxism or communism as they are to good old, free enterprise, competitive business and consumer sovereignty. That's what really gets them all worried. One can imagine what would happen if people could see what goes into their food, processed food products where they could see what frauds so many of the so-called cleaners and cleaning agents are and the kind of harm that's involved. Or they could see the enormous price fixing that goes on in the petroleum industry.

[00:17:07] Wealthy and powerful Americans were once again caught flat footed and once again really freaked out about regaining control of the narrative and the importance of free enterprise and, well, their own power with it all nighter in particular, had a real target on his back. He was Public Enemy number one. Companies were hiring investigators to follow him. I'm sure more than one had staff dedicated to digging up dirt on Nader. They tried to entrap him with women. Catch him getting paid off. Corporate America really wanted to take this guy down, in part because he was really good at framing the way corporations behaved as what was actually un-American, undemocratic, counter to freedom. Here he is doing just that in an interview with the British TV show Money Go Round in the 1970s.

[00:18:03] You're accused of being anti-business. You are, you know,

[00:18:09] basically the accusation is a mixture of of terminology we're against are illegal, deceptive, fraudulent, collusive behavior. And if they want to associate that with the term business, that's their own terminology, not ours. We'd like to separate you two.

[00:18:28] And do you think it's a conspiracy against people?

[00:18:31] Actually, it can be. That's incidental to them. They're not interested conspiring against people. They're interested in maximizing their own power and their own sales and their own profits and their own prestige. If the people get into the way, that's secondary, but that's not their primary purpose.

[00:18:48] Would you describe yourself as a revolutionary?

[00:18:51] No, actually. I describe the corporations as the revolutionaries. I mean, they're basically the institutions who are trying to upset our basic value systems. And I mean that very, very seriously. If we if you say our basic value systems, our compliance with the law are arm's length relationship with the government, our competitive quality competition, our concern for the neighbors are the avoidance of violent impacts on people and who are in effect, perpetuating all these injustices. Corporations produce most of the violence in terms of pollution and hazardous products. They corrupt governments. They, in effect, make a mockery out of competition and quality in the marketplace as they concentrate the economy in hands of larger and larger corporations.

[00:19:39] Again, for a while there, people power won. The civil rights movement saw some big wins. Women got access to birth control, the workforce and their own credit cards. Journalists shone a light on the corruption of war and politics, but it didn't take long for the corporate titans to recalibrate and for their PR geniuses to come up with new strategies. In 1971, attorney Lewis Powell appeared on the scene. He was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and sat on the board of Philip Morris for years, basically like a Richard Berman type, but quiet and soft spoken. So Paul writes this memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that reads a lot like Newsome's 1944 a fever dream about free enterprise. He says the American free enterprise system is under attack from those who prefer socialism or some form of statism. And then he particularly calls out universities and the media as problems for giving these attackers a platform, especially Nader, who Powell names specifically in this memo and describes as the quote single most effective antagonist of American business. Then, he says, the time has come. Indeed, it is long overdue for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it. Paul proposes that the Chamber of Commerce coordinate this battle for business, which is funny because back in the 1940s, Newsome was like, Don't use the chamber. That's too obvious. By the 1970s, they were desperate enough to act in plain sight. One of the first things that Paul suggests is to target university campuses. He pinpoints the university as ground zero for all this anti-free enterprise thought and goes on for many, many pages about it. He thinks the business community needs to get more pro-business faculty speakers and textbooks onto campuses for a start. He says wealthy businessmen should think about starting centers on university campuses focused on free enterprise. And he mentions the importance of getting into high schools with a pro free enterprise message, too. Now we've seen throughout this series how PR men have fought their propaganda battles in the press, on TV and even in train carriages. But this marks a shift to target people a bit earlier. It moved the battleground to schools and universities. And now, look, I'm not saying that there's one PR guy Earl Newsome or this one lobbyist, Lewis Powell, and his memo single handedly changed the course of American society. But all of those things that Newsom suggested back in the 40s and what Powell is laying out in his memo, they all actually happened. There was a huge increase in corporate funded curricula in high schools and universities. Here's one of my favorite examples American Enterprise, a five part film series about the American economy hosted by William Shatner and commissioned by Phillips Petroleum in the 1970s. It was used by high schools all over the country

[00:23:09] when we needed petroleum. We had it black gold in Pennsylvania and the Southwest when we needed uranium for nuclear power. We had our hills old enough to last for centuries. The land has provided on a grand scale. Most of us are optimistic and we have faith in our manifest destiny. Our land has fed that faith. It gave us the strength to make good our independence. It gave us room and time to grow in and things to grow on. Rich soil, immense forests, navigable rivers, water power, fossil fuels, minerals, the building blocks of agriculture and industry, it never disappointed us.

[00:24:06] Something else happened in the wake of the Powell memo, a sudden and rapid increase in the cost of college tuition. Here's Noam Chomsky, someone both Earl Newsome and Lewis Powell probably would have hated talking about that increase and the correlation between skyrocketing college tuition prices and the Powell memo. A few decades after that memo was sent,

[00:24:30] Powell was a corporate lobbyist, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, and he wrote a very important memorandum, very influential memorandum, I think 1971. The only choices, he said, are between freedom, free enterprise or bureaucratic regulation of our lives by the state. And they're winning. They've taken over everything. They're destroying free enterprise. He said the businessmen, he said, are the group that have the least influence in the country and government and the economy and everything else. And then he said, we've got to do something to mobilize, and the cure for it is the universities, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. He said after all, we the business world have the resources. We have the money, we fund them, we pay them. We're what's now called job creators, profit creators. And so we have the money. So we've got to mobilize and organize and do something about it. And right at that point, this kind of common conception across the spectrum did lead to many significant changes which you're living in right now. So it takes a student debt that is now, as you probably know, over over a trillion dollars, that's more than credit card debt. It's phenomenal. Well, that's a crucial way of dealing with the failure of the institutions responsible for indoctrination of the young. You come out of college with a heavy debt, you're trapped, but the rest of your life. Maybe you wanted to be, say, a public interest lawyer when you went to Harvard, but come out with tens of thousands of dollars of debt just going to have to go into a corporation to pay off your debt. You get trapped in the corporate culture. See any end of that.

[00:26:35] Making your message into school curricula, taking over universities, making college more expensive so the youth stop turning on business so much. There are some real guerrilla tactics right there. It's not a mad campaign or a TV interview. It's a large scale psychological manipulation. Here's Carroll Muffett, who heads up the Center for International Environmental Law and has been studying how oil companies in particular have contributed to this over the past few decades.

[00:27:05] What the industry is doing is making the teacher, making educators the messengers for their message. And when you do that, when you take your message and you put it in the mouth of someone who is teaching your children who is told, you know who children are told to believe and to trust, it is among the most insidious and among the most effective forms of propaganda.

[00:27:32] Today, we're at another one of these inflection points where there's a real wrestling for the story, for truth. Once again, we're seeing these cries of absolutely any form of government support being socialism. And we're seeing politicians and business leaders again point to universities and the media as a problem, as the enemy trying to take down American free enterprise. Here's one of several recent examples on Fox and Friends.

[00:28:06] Almost 50 percent of students coming out of university today believe that socialism is the answer. That's frightening to me. 50 percent. Home Depot's co-founder calling out the rise in socialism on college campuses across the country. How did we get here? Retired professor of liberal arts at NYU and author of Springtime for Snowflakes, Dr. Michael Rectangle, joins us live in the studio. Good morning to you, sir. Morning, Steve. You know, when you look at the rise of socialism, you think, Oh, this is something new. This isn't something new. This all started back in the 1920s. That's right. Well, yes, because you had professors going over to the Soviet Union, you know, from America going over to the Soviet Union, learning about the Soviet system of education and being convinced that they should bring it to the US and re-engineer the entire education system after it. OK, so that was decades ago. And then you combine that, which was ingrained in college campuses over the decades with, for instance, Bernie Sanders running for president two years ago. And it's like, Hey, why not? I'm an idealistic kid. I want everybody to get everything, but that's socialism.

[00:29:12] Everybody getting everything. That's socialism. The cycle is repeating itself yet again. And here's where I think that knowing about this history, knowing about the specific tactics and stories that have been told over and over and over again over the past century or more, and the specific people who've told them and why, maybe it helps us to spot these patterns in today's news cycle and to pause and think, Hmm, who does this story serve? What's being promoted here and by whom and for what? What are people trying to get me to think or do? And then, you know, decide for yourself, your decision may not match mine, but that's OK. That's freedom. We've heard about this handful of rich men who've used mountains of cash to manipulate the American public. Smooth talking bully her experts train spotter Ivy Ledbetter, Lee, Richard Dick, Evil Berman, Eduard Pina, Snake Bernays, the silent but deadly John Hill, the Edelman Dynasty of Disinfo and the PR man's PR man Earl New Song. But it's important to remember that there are also people working to dispel the mountain of bullshit these guys have dumped into the living room of American society. These guys don't always win. It was editorials unmasking of standard oil that first made the Rockefellers realize they were not above the law or untouchable. And today we remember Woody Guthrie's version of the Ludlow Massacre, not Ivy leads the Edelman's have been dragged into public scandals again and again and again. And Richard Berman's own son was on the record, calling him a despicable motherfucking sob a bitch. But above and beyond holding any one company or person accountable, it's important to think about the system that enables all these folks to do these things, how it came about and how we might fix it or scrap it altogether. That's it for this episode and for this series. I hope you've enjoyed our little tour of the PR Nether World for a whole lot more. Please check out our online archive at Rigged Dot Media. If you've enjoyed the show, let us know. Ratings and reviews help us find new listeners and decide whether to make more episodes. You can also find me on Twitter at Amy Westervelt or Drop Me a line at Amy Critical Frequency dot org. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is Martin's Elswick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Broad. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mary Anais Hagler, who you've heard throughout this series. You can get more of me and Mary on our podcast Hot Take, which also has a newsletter. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Historical Society, CBS News and the Vanderbilt University TV Archive. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks again for joining us.

Transcription

In 1944 the greatest threat to American industry wasn't World War II, it was convincing Americans to fall back in love with free-market capitalism after having experienced government systems that actually worked for the greater good. In the season finale of Rigged, we lay out the strategy contained in a never-before-published confidential document from the archive of Earl Newsom, Standard Oil of New Jersey's (today ExxonMobil) top PR guy from the late '30s to the late '60s.

Rigged Season 1

In Rigged, we rummage through the bag of tricks used by PR to shape the world you live in. Over the last century, these tricks have rigged the media, the government… society, really...with sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes profoundly serious effects on our democracy. This is a podcast about that war for hearts and minds right here on US soil.

A podcast about the way the PR industry helps corporations shape the world.

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

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S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

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